


Don't Take My Sunshine Away

by OnceUponMyDayDreams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Dana Scully deserves good things!, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Gen, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27512350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceUponMyDayDreams/pseuds/OnceUponMyDayDreams
Summary: Maybe she was just destined for this heart wrenching pain. She was destined to bring them to the world, but that seemed to be the gist of it. After all, her children had never been hers.---In which their second miracle is too much like the first one.I just had to write this, I'm sorry.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Don't Take My Sunshine Away

**Author's Note:**

> In which an angsty idea hits me and I reconsider posting it, but then I think maybe there are others out there who enjoy occasionally ripping out their beating hearts, like me.

Maybe she was just destined for this heart wrenching pain. She was destined to bring them to the world, but that seemed to be the gist of it. After all, her children had never been hers. Emily hadn't really ever been truly hers. William hadn't been hers for long. And Lily, Lily, her beautiful Lilian, heartbreakingly, was not meant to be hers either. 

She can't feel anything, her heart torn, a chasm. Her throat burns with bile. 

With Emily she hadn't even had a chance; with William and Lilian though... what was it about her womb and eggs that made kids special, too special for this world, too different? Too different to live, or too different to live in peace, just, too special. Too special for her to do anything about it, anything to save them, anything to protect them. As far as she was concerned, she was a colossal failure as a mother, her partner's reassurances be damned. How can she bring them into the world, one way or another, and then be unable to do something as biologically imperative as protect them? Shield them from the world until they were ready to undertake it themselves. Why couldn't she save them herself? Why did she always need outside help? Why did she always have to let them go? Why couldn't she just protect them herself? 

A failure, an utter failure. She forces her self to swallow and a sour taste burns all the way down, before rising back up again. 

Yet another failure, was all she could think as tears glistened in Mulder's eyes as he held their daughter. Scully stands a few steps away, stoic as a rock, hands buried deep in her coat pockets, not even shivering in the cold temperature, not even feeling it. Her skin is clamy and her stomach aches like someone ripped out her intestines. She doesn't feel it. 3 months old this time. They seem to leave her younger and younger, as if they just can't stand the sight of her, the feel of her, the thought of her mothering them. 

Somewhere in her brain she thinks she recognizes the words as bitter depression and self flagging, untrue, cruelty directed at herself in hatred and helplessness; unhealthy. A rational part of her wants to save herself, but she drowns it out. She doesn't deserve saving. She can't even save her own children. 

She has the fleeting thought that her neck should ache. Maybe it did, she'd been locked in the same position for what felt like hours, staring hard at a spot in front of her slightly below eye level, never even shifting, not seeing anything around her, not taking anything in. Mulder is tearfully rocking their sleeping baby girl, making soothing noises and whispering, but no, she doesn't see that, she can't, she can't. It's background noise. Her gut twists. Sour bile creeps up the back of her tongue. She pushes it down. He keeps whispering to the baby (her baby, hers, for a few more minutes) but Lilian sleeps on completely unaware. 

William had been wide awake, his 10-month-old chubby little fists flailing as he was passed from woman to woman, recognizing Monica taking him, but watching the new woman he was handed to with wide, curious eyes. He tried to turn around to look at his mother, but Monica softly diverted his gaze away, and Scully never told her, but she is eternally grateful for keeping her son from seeing his mother stoic as a rock as another woman walked away with him. Monica had waved and closed the door after the social worker with a soft click, plunging them into a silence so absolute her ears popped, and when Scully had lunged for the door, Monica had stood right there, ready to either hold her if she crumbled against the hard wood, or open the door for her to go after her son; whatever she needed. Neither happened. She lunged for the door and froze, hand up in mid air, and Monica stood there with her. 

Her nose itches. She doesn't flinch, swallowing down bile again. Nothing, she can't feel anything, her world is ending. Again. 

The first time it had been a terminal diagnosis that had made her let go, trying to give her daughter peace in her last moments. The second time had been death threats during her pregnancy, all the way up to his birth, and then strange women calling him 'otherworldly' and taking him from her, burning him, combined with an assassin out to get him and a familial relation out to sabotage him. This time it had taken a bomb to finally make her surrender. She didn't even have to say anything, the devastation on her face must have been enough because Mulder's shoulders crumbled and he took Lily from her arms, holding her as tightly as he dared, wanting to argue, she knew, but knowing it would be futile, because their skin was covered in soot and the heat of the flames from the burning car was still singeing their skin; it had been that close. If it weren't for their tightly honed instincts, she would have strapped her daughter into that carseat and closed the door and the moment she'd done that... It was too close, too fucking close, and the last straw. 

They'd been on the run for 5 months, and so far, it had been worse than with William. Perhaps it was because William had been planned by those people, but Lily seemed to be an accident. She seemed to be the only one born naturally, or as naturally as she could be born from the barren womb of a woman abducted and genetically altered. Nevertheless, Lilian wasn't in their plans, and they wanted her captured, tested, dead or alive. 

The social worker is younger than the one who'd taken William, less weathered, and it showed; the young woman can't quite keep herself from tearing up as Mulder cries his goodbyes to their daughter, and she refuses to meet Scully's vacant stare, glancing at her nervously, expecting a breakdown. Scully had barely put Lilian down since she made the call, Mulder wrapped tightly around them both, but when the SUV pulled up to the little run-down safe house they'd spent the night in, she went cold, cold. All the way down to her bones, her soul. Cold. This was it, again. The warmth she'd had Lily wrapped around in was suddenly sucked out of her and she handed her to Mulder before her heart could catch up to her brain, just like she did 17 years ago with William, handing him to Monica before the vicious pain inside her could overwhelm her into locking her child in her embrace tight enough for them both to run out of oxygen, so she'd never have to let go. 

She'd called Agent Dogget, or, Detective Superintendent, as he went by now, all the way in England where he'd uprooted his life to. She'd barely had to explain herself, ending the call with a morose "You know what to do.", holding her nursing baby to her breast while her mind stayed above the events happening around her in a state of limbo, feeling Lily suckling and her half-in-shock brain trying to disassociate, Mulder glued to her side, running a wet cloth over her hair, trying to clean away the soot and ash from the explosion. 

Their baby girl had no real records, she'd been born while her parents were passing through a small town on false papers, so there was an Alice Harrison registered to a tiny clinic in a rundown town in the North of the US, but her name was Lilian, and her parents called her Lily. They thought one day they would be able to finally stop and settle down, properly give her her name, they'd even fled the country but it hadn't been a week before they'd been found. They'd run and fought and did their damnedest not to give up, but in the end, it wasn't enough. She was never enough. 

It was time. 

Scully's eyes never stray from her hard stare on the SUV's tires, and she isn't consciously ignoring what is happening, but she is definitely disassociating, not really pretending but not really connecting either, trying not to but definitely seeing out of the corner of her eye Lily pass from Mulder to the social worker, seeing feminine shoes approach the car and open the door, staring hard a the tires and hearing the clicking of the belt on the carseat, the door closing, the woman getting in the car, the engine running, the tires over the gravel road, until they are out of her sight, her eyes fixed to the point they had been, the sound of the car driving away, away, inhaling the dust it left behind through her shallow breaths. She might yet throw up. 

She doesn't, but that might be because she hasn't eaten in days. 

Beside her, Mulder collapses on the front stoop, heaving with dry sobs, loud and ragged, hyperventilating. 

She stares and stares at the gravel that was disturbed by the tires and the heavy weight of the SUV, the indentations clear as the sky above. Nothing. 

With Emily, it had rained, a deluge to rival the tears she'd shed in the shower alone that night. With William, it was cloudy, damp and grey as she tried to convince herself not to drown herself in the bath. Today, today is clear, shot with pink and purple in the dusk, the sun leaving until tomorrow morning when a new day would begin, whether she or her children lived to see it or not. 

It didn't matter, nothing did. Nothing, nothing. There was nothing, nothing left inside her. Nothing. Nothing mattered. 

The sun would never shine again.

**Author's Note:**

> I had to, I had to do write this and post it because it's just not fathomable to me that Lily would be normal, not after William. Also, because I didn't like how the series ended (again), not because I want Scully to go through this pain again, but because there just has to be more to it, to all of it! 
> 
> (who named her, by the way? In every other fic I see her named Lily) 
> 
> Dana Scully deserves only good things!! I'm so sorry I did this to her! And Mulder! Oh God, what have I done!!


End file.
